Server Move: All pages leading home

Question

The Problem.

No matter which URL I enter, all pages display the site's static front page. Known site URLs load the home page (but keep the URL entered) and should-be 404 paths like /I-know-you-do-not-exist-4343 also load the homepage (again, keeping the URL).

I can get to the WordPress admin without problem—it's just the front end of the site that's being screwy.

Also, the site works fine if I remove permalinks entirely and go with ?post=2. Site css/js/images are loading fine.

Just the facts, please:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• Apache 2.4.7
• PHP 5.6.19-1
• nginx 1.4.6 (front end)
• Wordpress 4.4.2
• mod_rewrite is enabled (conf file below)
• permissions and ownership are all set. WP can rewrite the .htaccess file.

I generally define the two site url options dynamically in wp-config but have tried removing them as well as manually entering them both in the wp-config and directly into the database.

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . '/wordpress');
define('WP_HOME',    'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);

I’ve flushed my permalinks, crushed cookies and restarted apache just about 800 times.

I've disabled all plugins.

For source control reasons, Wordpress is in a subfolder ala Jaquith’s skeleton. Basically,

 /var/www/html/ 
 /var/www/html/app/ (wp-content)
 /var/www/html/media/ (wp-content/uploads) 
 /var/www/html/wordpress/

And here’s the bit from my conf file:

    DocumentRoot /var/www/html
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
    <Directory "/var/www/html">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

Basic nginx->apache is working fine. It’s forwarding on :8080 and ports.conf as well as my virtual host site.conf file are listening for it. That is, if I put <?php phpinfo(); ?> into a static php file, all works as expected.

Initially, I had the infinite loop problem and have since added this to my site plugin:

remove_filter('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical’);

Here's the nginx conf (basically the standard version the internetz say to use):

server {
   listen 80;
   root /var/www/html;
   index index.php index.html index.htm;

   server_name example.com;

   location / {
     try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
   }

   location ~ \.php$ {
     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
     proxy_set_header Host $host;
     proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
   }

   location ~ /\.ht {
      deny all;
   }
}

And here are the Response Headers for a typical request:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 02:13:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 5600
Connection: keep-alive
Link: <http://example.com/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/", <http://example.com/>; rel=shortlink
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip

Answer 1

Your proxy is rewriting everything to index.php, which means that the backend never sees the original URI. The proxy should be transparent, like this:

server {
   listen 80;

   server_name example.com;

   location / {
     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
     proxy_set_header Host $host;
     proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
   }
}